Question

I know that quicksort has O(n log n) average time complexity. A pseudo-quicksort (which is only a quicksort when you look at it from far enough away, with a suitably high level of abstraction) that is often used to demonstrate the conciseness of functional languages is as follows (given in Haskell):

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort []     = []
quicksort (p:xs) = quicksort [y | y<-xs, y<p] ++ [p] ++ quicksort [y | y<-xs, y>=p]

Okay, so I know this thing has problems. The biggest problem with this is that it does not sort in place, which is normally a big advantage of quicksort. Even if that didn’t matter, it would still take longer than a typical quicksort because it has to do two passes of the list when it partitions it, and it does costly append operations to splice it back together afterwards. Further, the choice of the first element as the pivot is not the best choice.

But even considering all of that, isn’t the average time complexity of this quicksort the same as the standard quicksort? Namely, O(n log n)? Because the appends and the partition still have linear time complexity, even if they are inefficient.

Answer 1

This “quicksort” is actually deforested tree sort:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2h0j2/real_quicksort_in_haskell

data Tree a = Leaf | Node a (Tree a) (Tree a)

mkTree [] = Leaf
mkTree (x:xs) = Node x (mkTree (filter (<= x) xs)) (mkTree (filter (x <) xs))

Binary tree is unbalanced, so O(N^2) worst-case and O(N*Log N) average-case complexity for building search tree.

foldTree f g Leaf = g
foldTree f g (Node x l r) = f x (foldTree f g l) (foldTree f g r)

treeSort l = foldTree (\x lft rht -> lft++[x]++rht) [] (mkTree l)

Retrieval algorithm have O(N^2) worst-case and O(N*Log N) average-case complexity.

Well-balanced:

Prelude> let rnds = iterate step where step x = (75*x) `mod` 65537
Prelude> length . quicksort . take 4000 . rnds $ 1
4000
(0.08 secs, 10859016 bytes)
Prelude> length . quicksort . take 8000 . rnds $ 1
8000
(0.12 secs, 21183208 bytes)
Prelude> length . quicksort . take 16000 . rnds $ 1
16000
(0.25 secs, 42322744 bytes)

Not-so-well-balanced:

Prelude> length . quicksort . map (`mod` 10) $ [1..4000]
4000
(0.62 secs, 65024528 bytes)
Prelude> length . quicksort . map (`mod` 10) $ [1..8000]
8000
(2.45 secs, 241906856 bytes)
Prelude> length . quicksort . map (`mod` 10) $ [1..16000]
16000
(9.52 secs, 941667704 bytes)